Challenges Archives - Page 2 of 3 - My Online Business Journey

PPC Challenge: How Am I Doing After 3 Weeks?

It’s time for another update on my PPC challenge. Last week I was on vacation in Jamaica, so no I made no progress in adding more campaigns, but my existing campaigns continued to run.

So, let’s see how I am doing.

So far, I started 15 campaigns

– 1 to a landing page

– 8 direct to a merchant on CJ

– 6 direct to merchants on SAS

Here are my starts as of now:

Impressions: 56,342
Clicks: 435
CTR: 0.77% (this went up a little bit since my first week, but it’s still to low)
Cost: $99.68
Commission: $72.34
Profit: – $27.37 Yep! I am in the red, but that’s normal during the blasting. As I learn more about what my market is looking for, I’ll add more negative keywords, remove key phrases that are not performing, etc.

What is important is that out of 15 campaigns, I had 4 sales: 2 from the same campaigns, and one each from two other campaigns. this means I have 3 winning campaigns, which I can tweak and improve once my blasting is done.

My 3 FaceBook ads are yet to get a click, but I received an email from them, with suggestions for improvement. I didn’t have time to apply their suggestions yet, but it’s on my list for this week.

Also for this week: I need to step up my blasting, or I won’t be able to do 50 campaigns. I am going to try 15 campaigns this week, and I’ll be back next Monday with another update.

If you’d like to learn how to successfully learn PPC marketing, check out Matt’s Campaigns blast report.

03/22/2010 by Adriana | Comments Off

Challenges, Google Adwords

PPC Challenge Update

As promised in my original post about this PPC challenge, this is an update on what I’ve been doing to meet my challenge goals.

Just as a reminder, I am shooting for 50 PPC campaigns before March is over: that means 2 campaigns a day, 5 days a week, and this past week, I haven’t met that goal. I did 7 campaigns:

– 1 to a landing page (I purchased some domains a while ago for specific products, and never did anything with them, so built one small site and I am directing some traffic to it with PPC). This page is monetized with a specific product from Amazon.com

– 1 direct to a merchant on CJ

– 5 direct to merchants on SAS

My ads are getting too many impressions, and not so many clicks, which makes for a very low CTR (see image above). That’s not good, and it means I probably have to tweak my ads.

Here are my starts as of now:

Impressions: 19,427
Clicks: 96
CTR: 0.49%
Cost: $34.52
Commission: $61.18
Profit: $26.66

This week, I need to get more serious, and start even more campaigns, as next Sunday I’ll be heading to Jamaica for a few days, and the following week I won’t be adding any campaigns.

I’ll let you know how I am doing next week.

If you’d like to join me and others in this challenge, there is still time: check out Matt’s Campaigns blast report before you get started: it will save you from making many mistakes.

03/08/2010 by Adriana | Comments Off

Challenges

February Challenge – Did I Meet It?

At the beginning of this month I challenged myself publicly to increase traffic to this site by 75%, and to accomplish that, I was going to do several things.

First, I was going got post at least 5 times a week, and since the day of the challenge (February 7th) I posted 19 posts, so I met that challenge.

Second, I was going to submit one article a week to a few article directories, and only submitted one, so I fell short on that one.

Third, I was going to guest post at least once, and I did 5 guest posts, so I exceeded that.

So, did all that help me increase my visitors 75%? Unfortunately, no. I fell short by a couple of hundred visitors. Here is a snapshot of my February visitors.

February 2010 stats

What I learned form this month’s challenge? I can guest post! And if I can, so can anyone else. Yes, it takes me a long time to come up with a good guest post, but the rewards are incredible!

Here are my guest posts for February:

Keyword Research with Shopping.com

How to Select Keywords for a Pay Per Click Campaign

5 Online Business Models You Can Start Right Now

Follow Me Buttons on Sidebar

How To Do Keyword Research With EBay

I also learned that posting daily on my blog is too much for me: I’d rather write quality content than try to push lots of content that doesn’t meet my quality standards.

In the end, I am happy with what I accomplished this past month, and I will continue to come up with monthly challenges to grow my business.

How about you?

Edited to add: I actually did one more guest post, so a total of 6. Not sure how I forgot it. Here it is: Plus Size Wedding Dress Niche, a guest post similar to my own free niche research.

03/01/2010 by Adriana | 8 Comments

Challenges

My February Traffic Challenge

I don’t know about you, but challenges, especially public ones get results. Last month, Lynn Terry challenged all her Elite Members to an office clean up. I am very happy with my results for that challenge, so this month I am challenging myself publicly to increase traffic to this blog. How much? I am going to shoot for 75% increase in unique traffic (I was going to do 50%, but noticed I am on track for that anyway, so it wouldn’t stretch me too much). My blog is fairly new (only started it at the end of October last year), but already has a good number of daily visitors.

So, in order to keep myself accountable, here are my January stats:

January 2010 stats

This means, I need 2084 unique visitors in February in order to accomplish this challenge. I need to get to work immediately, as I only have 379 unique visitors for February as of now, so I am way behind.

I noticed that my daily visitors are dependent on my posting schedule: if I post, regularly, my visitor number grows exponentially.

So, in order to accomplish getting 2084 visitors this month, here is what I am plannign to do:

– post 5 times a week, no matter how hard that will be. I tend to write about 3 posts a week, but need to be more disciplined and post more.

– submit one article each week to EZA, Go Articles, Idea Marketers, etc

– guest post at least once

That’s yet for now. I’ll be back at the beginning of next month with my results.

Do you need more traffic to your blog/site? Why not join me in this challenge? Let me know below if you’d like to join my challenge, and we can keep each other accountable.

02/07/2010 by Adriana | 5 Comments

Challenges

My Organized Office

Last month, Lynn Terry challenged all of us at her Elite forum to clean up/organize our office space: not only out physical space, but our computer desktop, email, hard drive, etc.

The challenge couldn’t have come at a better time for me, as I was already planning to do some virtual organizing: it made me push through and get it all done.

Here is my office before the challenge, and here is how it looks today:

organized office

But, my biggest problem wasn’t my physical desk: it was my desktop and email. For example, I had over 1500 unread emails in my inbox: this was not a recent problem, but one going back to more than a year. My inbox didn’t go under 1000 unread messages for an entire year. And I am happy to say that today, I only have the day’s messages.

My desktop was a real mess, with icons overflowing out of the visible area. And I am proud to say that my desktop looks so much better: just need to work on making sure it never gets as cluttered as before.

Here are the before and after pictures for that:

messy computer desktop